As you may be aware of, most of the file transiting from the web server (with the notable exception of pictures) are text based.
And text files are the most efficient to compress. Though disabled by default, enabling compression is a really quick way to reduce transit and speed up your website up to 80%!
Important: beware of the associated risk of enabling gzip compression if you are using SSL as noticed in the ngx_http_gzip_module page.
When using the SSL/TLS protocol, compressed responses may be subject to BREACH attacks.
Here is the way to enable gzip compression to your Nginx configuration:
server {
...
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_min_length 1000;
gzip_types
application/atom+xml
application/geo+json
application/javascript
application/json
application/ld+json
application/manifest+json
application/rdf+xml
application/rss+xml
application/x-javascript
application/xhtml+xml
application/xml
font/eot
font/otf
font/ttf
image/svg+xml
text/css
text/javascript
text/plain
text/xml;
...
}
By default, browsers locally store website assets in order to avoid fetching them again next time you visit the same page.
Each browser has its own mechanics about this but the web server can provide cache control and expiration dates through headers when responding.
Again, this allows to both speed up the page loads and avoid unnecessary traffic:
location ~* \.(?:css|eot|gif|ico|jpe?g|otf|png|ttf|woff2?)$ {
expires 1M;
add_header Cache-Control "public";
}
Logging every request consumes both CPU and I/O cycles, and there are several ways to reduce the impact of access logging.
Make sure to review the documentation of the ngx_http_log_module when modifying this directive.
With buffering, instead of performing a separate write operation for each log entry, Nginx buffers a series of entries and writes them to the file together in a single operation.
This is comprehensively explained in the Access Logging section of the Tuning NGINX for Performance article in the Nginx blog.
You can also disable access logging for specific locations such as favicon.ico and robots.txt.
location = /favicon.ico {
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
}
location = /robots.txt {
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
}
Notice we are using the exact match modifier = to speed up the processing of these requests.
If your PrestaShop installation does not require access logging, you can use the special value off in the access_log directive to completely disable access logging.
server {
...
access_log off
...
}
.well-known directory (Let’s Encrypt / PKI validation, Apple Pay)The .well-known directory is a resource documented in RFC 8615 and used by many services.
If you need an external access to the .well-known directory, you can update you nginx configuration to use:
# .htaccess, .DS_Store, .htpasswd, etc., but keep .well-known available
location ~* /\.(?!well-known\/) {
deny all;
}
# files in .well-known should be served as plain text.
location ~* ^/\.well-known\/ {
default_type text/plain;
}